The village of Shortstown was created on the site of an old mill on Tinker’s Hill just outside Bedford. Its purpose was to house the workers of the Shorts Brothers aerospace company, which specialised in building military airships and had been given the site by the Admiralty in 1916. Within a few years, the Short Brothers had left, but the village remained, now housing the workforce of the nearby RAF Cardington base. The village was built in a style described as ‘simplified neo-Georgian’. The architect was the unfortunately named Robert Burns Dick, who later went on to design the distinctive granite towers on the Tyne Bridge. Shortstown and Cardington retained their links with the British military through the twentieth century and up to the present day – the houses at Shortstown became married quarters for RAF personnel – and the site of the former works retains the dour and slightly sinister sense of mystery that always seems to pervade MOD land.
Into this landscape haunted by Cold War ghosts comes the mysterious entity known as Radiophoric Labs, a hauntological project of unknown provenance apparently created to tackle the Bedfordshire edition of the Folklore Tapes Ceremonial Counties series. Whoever is behind Radiophoric Labs does a compelling job of creating an atmosphere of dreary, post-apocalyptic dread. Glitchy analogue electronics are the order of the day, and they come in various forms: bleeps and pings and hisses that sound like transmissions from a greyed-out future, sinister hums, ghostly chimes, bursts of static. This is hauntology 101: a crash course in the genre’s more terrifying tropes, but it is done with such panache that you know whoever is behind it almost certainly has previous in this particular field.
The second side features the work of Wooden Tape, the alias of Tim Maycox, a Liverpool art teacher. He has been given the task of representing Greater London, and has chosen as his subject the commuter town of Surbiton (known, to me at least, for two things: being the burial place of Victorian nature writer Richard Jefferies and the setting for iconic sitcom The Good Life). Surbiton has become something of a symbol of suburbia: middle brow, middle class, apparently harmless but maybe, just maybe, seething with weird sex and and barely concealed violence.
Maycox does well to avoid the stereotypes and finds plenty of positives in an apparently unassuming town. Like Radiophoric Labs, his practice is anchored to hauntology, but he takes a more subtle approach, and delves further into history, imagining a time when the Thames carried royal entourages to nearby Hampton Court Palace. Maycox splits his piece into three. The first part deals with the river, and is both courtly and delicate: ushered in by a field recording of water, a simple three-note motif plays out against drones and warbles. It has the serenity of Japanese classical music. Maycox then takes us on a journey through Heath and Pavement (with an ecclesiastical-sounding passage and some soft, folksy guitar), showing us London and its suburban hinterlands from various unusual angles and presenting it as a place where peace and quiet can be enjoyed as much as the lively bustle.
Taken together, the two pieces present two very different sides of the hauntological coin, and prove that there is still plenty of mileage left in the genre.
Note on the Series: Each tape can be collected individually each month or as one entire subscription, and they are available via Folklore Tapes directly at www.folkloretapes.co.uk or via their Bandcamp page at https://folkloretapes.bandcamp.com/ and via selected independent record shops.